OpenGL 2.0 White Papers

Timothy J. Wood writes "3DLabs has posted a series of white papers on OpenGL 2.0 covering topics such as improving parallelism, timing control, minimizing data movement programmable pixel pack and unpack and (most notably) a proposal for a hardware independent shading language."

Comments

Shading Language

[bribecka]

It's about time they get a programmable shading language in OpenGL--that is the most lacking feature in my opinion. Probably 90% of the textures used in things like games could be eliminated and replaced with much higher quality shaders that not only get rid of the repeatability of textures, but also *gain* detail as the distance decreases.

Can't wait! Hopefully they'll base it on something already well established, ie. Renderman SL.

Way too late.

[Otis_INF]

Microsoft, allthough they're a member of the ARB, has > 90% of the desktop market, and is moving forward with a rapid speed towards the heavy workstation market. With this situation comes the fact that DirectX is THE platform to target when it comes to 3D accelerated code.

What's another issue is that Microsoft, up till now, has refused to distribute an updated opengl32.dll with their Operating Systems. The current version is the old OpenGL v1.1 compatible version. SGI has said it has distributed a v1.2 version to Microsoft, but for whatever reason, it's not distributed further to the clients. This widens the gap between a non-uniform OpenGL platform still on v1.1, forcing you to use non-standard stuff like vendor-specific extensions and vendor specific opengl loading on one side and the DirectX API on the other. Without Microsoft's help, OpenGL will never be in the front seat again on Windows systems and because they're gaining a lot of marketshare in the workstation market, also not in that typical OpenGL area.

Re:Way too late.

[Mike Connell]

Not really. Most people using windows for 3d graphics in the workstation area are using a high end graphics card. By that I mean GeForce3 or faster.

They all come with OpenGL drivers. You dont even notice that MS doesn't ship them. Install video cards drivers, get OpenGL.

MS is really in a position to lose market here to Linux because of this: Linux on a PC with fast 3d (via nvidia for example) is infinitely more like the workstation being replaced than NT on a PC is.

At the higher workstation end (higher than GeForce3), people aren't yet looking at windows because the hardware isn't there anyway.

I think it'll be a while before OpenGL dies, especially as in all markets people are finally moving up the ladder - to scenegraph API's like this one.

If the SG supports both DX and OGL backends then you dont even have to think about it.

my random 0.02,
Mike

In a nutshell: OpenGL2 good; "Pure" OpenGL bad

[arQon]

Honestly, the only really annoying thing about working with OpenGL lately is the headaches that come from pixel/vertex shaders. We certainly need a vendor-independent way to support those, because damned if I'm going to rewrite mine for ATI cards - they'll simply be treated as "not supporting vertex programs".

The synchronisation stuff is pretty handy: certainly, NV_fence has been very useful over the past year or so, and again: vendor-specific paths BAD. :)

Some of the changes seem to be as much to persuade some-ignorant developers to use OpenGL over D3D - the "black box" aspects of OpenGL are one the more DESIRABLE things about it. Changing those because some D3D guy is saying "I do xyz in D3D and I want the exact same concept to work well in GL because I'm too thick to actually use the right approach for that renderer" seems simply wrong to me.

Uh-oh: UPS just kicked in. Yay mountain storms...

"Pure" OpenGL2 is a terrible mistake. Give vendors the option NOT to support something, and they won't. Then all your old apps+games are up shit creek.

Will finish later when I have stable power again...

The future of OpenGL article

[codexus]

Here's a very nice article about the future of OpenGL. It might be easier to read than the full OpenGL 2.0 white papers.

Re:Meeting minutes

[DGolden]

(a) mainframes are still around. If anything they're experiencing massive growth, thanks to IBM remarketing them as ultra-reliable linux virtual server solutions.

(b) As a mechanical engineer and computational fluid dynamicist, I assure you, the workstations are not "dominated by windows" - most people are still on SGIs, and the majority of those that aren't are moving to Linux, not Windows NT, under the advice of the application vendors, who find supporting their apps on linux much less of a pain than on WinNT.

Unix Clusters aren't going away either. Just because you can do on one computer what took a cluster two years ago, doesn't mean that people like me won't just find more complex problems to do. Depending on the application, there's a spectrum of cost/performance solutions that may be worthwhile - if you're simulating a nuclear explosion, and CPUs get more powerful, you don't necessarily downsize, you might make the simulation more accurate by using roughly the same amount of computers to do much more. Human's AREN'T able to simulate the physical world with complete accuracy - but the more calculations, the better (assuming perfect programming), at least until you hit quantum limits, and then it takes EVEN MORE power to do probabilistic predictions via monte-carlo or sum-over-histories....